Voice-mail system displays frustration at Peak Stupidity blogger


Posted On: Thursday - July 12th 2018 5:24PM MST
In Topics: 
  Humor  Curmudgeonry  Artificial Stupidity

Tax service customer care employees hard at work:



I suppose Peak Stupidity could just become a total forum of curmudgeonry and never run out of things to write about, but THAT'S! NOT! WHOM! WE! ARE! (notice the strictly correct grammar in our use of this now-ubiquitous phrase.) There are 2 areas which by themselves would never have as running out of stupidity, and those are driving on the roads and customer service, oh, it's "customer care" now. We will get back to politics, shorty, so please don't change your channel requested IP number.

This customer service experience (!!) involved a call to the government, well one form of government, anyway, in order to straighten out a discrepancy with taxes. My blood pressure was already up 15 mmHg before I even considered the what kind of hassle the voice-menu system would be. See, I DO! NOT! TALK! TO! COMPUTERS! This ain't stardate 2245, and I ain't Captain James T. Kirk. That may seem to be a problem, but almost every one of these systems is set up to respond to touch-tones - touch tones? WTF are those anymore? ... Anyway, you just swipe around with faggy motions on a small screen. (Hell, we used to have TVs bigger than these things!)

The trick is whether you can get away with just mashing one "0" after the next until a live English?-speaking customer care representative condescends to speak with you. That doesn't work all the time. Some systems have been programmed to hang up on you. That comes across as very rude, and it's hard to get back at a computer server farm for that. I spent 15-20 minutes one time trying different combinations of numbers, some times having to re-dial, but I finally got to a human. I was pretty worried about being able to pull the trick again, as my attempts had not been very scientific. I forgot to take notes, as frustrated as I was.

Well, by the 2nd "0" the other day, during my attempted first contact with the tax people, the system didn't hang up on me. However, the 2nd time the computer-generated digital voice signal said "That is not a valid option", it was more like "That is NOT a valid OPTION!" I swear that the voice had some inflection programmed in for the second time around. Is it that much damn trouble for a computer to do something twice!? Ask your average transistor in an array of RAM. That's what they're all geared up to do - the same old shit over and over (x 1 x 1020) again. If this was some programers' idea of a "smart system", well then, kudos to you guys! It'll probably work to get me off the phone. I hate slamming these smart phones down too, as this cheap China-made crap just doesn't stand up to that kind of thing like an old bakelite receiver sub-assembly.

What a concept! Call it "programmable inflection" or "corporate-selectable voice-system frustration levels". They give out patents for anything in software these days, so I will leave this for the readers, no charge.

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